It’s only 29 years late

Bruce Schneier has a few words about mission creep: everything is looking like terrorism to our surveillance state.

One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government’s spying on American citizens is that it’s only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there’s a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of "terrorism" and "weapon of mass destruction" are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.

Back in 2002, the Patriot Act greatly broadened the definition of terrorism to include all sorts of "normal" violent acts as well as non-violent protests. The term "terrorist" is surprisingly broad; since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it has been applied to people you wouldn’t normally consider terrorists.

The most egregious example of this are the three anti-nuclear pacifists, including an 82-year-old nun, who cut through a chain-link fence at the Oak Ridge nuclear-weapons-production facility in 2012. While they were originally arrested on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, the government kept increasing their charges as the facility’s security lapses became more embarrassing. Now the protestors have been convicted of violent crimes of terrorism — and remain in jail.

One other interesting twist: did you know psychologists have actually looked at the effect of constant monitoring, and among them are stress, distrust of authority, and conformity?

As the world’s governments march toward universal surveillance, their ignorance of psychology is clear at every step. Even in the 2009 House of Lords report “Surveillance: Citizens and the State” [pdf] – a document that is critical of surveillance – not a single psychologist is interviewed and, in 130 pages, not a single reference is made to decades of psychological research.

We ignore this evidence at our peril. Psychology forewarns us that a future of universal surveillance will be a world bereft of anything sufficiently interesting to spy on – a beige authoritarian landscape in which we lose the ability to relax, innovate, or take risks. A world in which the definition of “appropriate” thought and behaviour becomes so narrow that even the most pedantic norm violations are met with exclusion or punishment. A world in which we may even surrender our very last line of defence – the ability to look back and ask: Why did we do this to ourselves?

This authoritarianism is going to be the legacy of this last decade, and it’s going to be to Obama’s lasting disgrace that he contributed so blithely to it.

Last refuge of the scoundrel

There is a facebook page called The Patriot Nation, and it’s exactly what you’d expect: people raging against an America that isn’t white. And it is on facebook, so hell no, it’s never going to get taken down, even when it lies.

This is how it lies. The photo on the left, below, is the original, of a woman protesting the Trayvon Martin verdict. It didn’t fit the racist narrative of the goddamn Patriot Nation, though, so they had to do a little blatant photoshop tweaking, and produced the faked photo on the right.

racistphotoshop

These scum are the people who defile the good name of my country, who make me gag and recoil when someone calls anyone a “patriot”. That woman on the left? I’d be proud to call her my fellow American.

Say, I’ve seen this strategy in action before…

A damaging, irrational pack of nonsense is rebuked by politicians and slapped down by the courts. Proponents of the idiocy then step back and start surreptitiously (and sometimes openly) smuggling it into the classroom — if they can’t get their way now, they figure, by corrupting the next generation and keeping them ignorant, maybe they’ll be able to get their way later.

That’s straight from the creationist playbook. That’s what they’ve been up to for decades. So I’m completely unsurprised by what’s going on in the UK, where anti-gay policies perpetrated by that awful person, Margaret Thatcher, were defeated years ago…and now they’re being reinvigorated by injecting them into the schools.

Ministers, Opposition MPs and gay rights activists united to express anger and alarm over the disclosure that academies across the country had adopted policy statements that echoed the notorious Section 28 brought in by Margaret Thatcher 25 years ago.

The legislation, which was overturned by the Blair government, banned teachers in lessons from “intentionally promoting” homosexuality, a form of words that critics denounced for discriminating against gay pupils.

Campaigners have identified more than 40 schools across the country that stress in their sex-education guidelines that governors will not allow teachers to “promote” homosexuality, or are ambiguous on the issue.

So familiar…we’re on the right side of history, but the good guys all naively cheer when the right laws are enacted or overturned, thinking that now the problems will go away. That’s never true. Laws don’t change people’s minds, and our opposition knows that — and they’ve got these potent institutions, the churches, that they can use to promote extra-legal policies and attitudes and try to steer the populace back into the Middle Ages.

Creepers have the right to not be mocked, apparently

You know what’s weird about the video below? The media are more indignant about the video than they are about Mayor Bob Filner’s behavior! How dare people re-appropriate a sexist song to mock a creeper?

Wait, that’s not weird at all. This seems to be the standard line: when a powerful man is accused of sexual misconduct, the source must be discredited by any means.

Orson Scott Card is even worse than I imagined

He’s also a racist conspiracy theorist. I’m not a fan of Obama myself, but Card’s ideas are hateful and loony — he thinks Obama is going to place Michelle Obama in the presidency with a force of “national police”.

"Where will he get his ‘national police’? The NaPo will be recruited from ‘young out-of-work urban men’ and it will be hailed as a cure for the economic malaise of the inner cities.

"In other words, Obama will put a thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send them out to channel their violence against Obama’s enemies.

"Instead of doing drive-by shootings in their own neighborhoods, these young thugs will do beatings and murders of people ‘trying to escape’ — people who all seem to be leaders and members of groups that oppose Obama."

Utterly bonkers. And here there’s a movie coming out based on one of his books…which I will not be seeing. Ever.

Signs & portents

The Times has released their rankings of the world reputation for various universities. The news is rather depressing.

Overall, the US continues to dominate the rankings, with seven of the top 10 places and a total of 76 institutions in the top 200 – one more than last year and 45 more than any other nation. The UK has 31 representatives, followed by the Netherlands with 12.

But the US’ dominance of the rankings masks a picture of decline.

Although the US ultra-elite at the summit of the rankings have generally managed to consolidate their positions – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rising two places to fifth and the University of California, Berkeley moving from 10th to ninth – many more American institutions fell than climbed the table.

“If you only give a casual glance at the top 200, you’re likely to think it’s just a round-up of the usual suspects,” says Ruby. “Yes, many of the big names of US higher education head the list – the ‘super-brands’ still dominate, and they will continue to do so while they attend to core business and protect their image as elite research-based institutions.

“But when you look more closely, most of the flagship US public universities are slipping down.”

How can this be? Slipping? Us? I believe it.

And that’s exactly what’s been happening, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Public universities and colleges in nearly every state have seen their state funding decline sharply. Nationwide, states are on average spending 28 percent less this year than they did in 2008, a decrease of $2,353 per student. As a result, colleges and universities have had to raise tuition, make changes that undermine educational quality, or usually both.

Not surprisingly, the changing position of American universities mirrors the larger political economy of the United States: a few “super-brands” at the top (which educate the sons and daughters of the world’s elite) continue to stay at the top while most of the others (which are supposed to educate the children of the American working-class) are falling behind, both nationally and internationally.

Meanwhile, our Republican masters will consider all this a good thing, and propose more cuts to put those eggheads in their place, and consider more demands to include religious dogma in our science classes, and replace objective sources of information with more right-wing think tanks that give them the answers they want to hear.

I support Nahla Mahmoud

Nahla Mahmoud is the spokesperson for the Council of Ex-Muslims in the UK. Salah Al Bandar is a director of the Sudan Civic Foundation in the UK. Al Bandar has chosen a dangerous method to politically suppress his opponent: Al Bandar has incited Muslims to threaten Mahmoud and her family.

Following an interview on Channel 4 on Sharia law, Islamists have threatened Sudanese secular campaigner and Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain Spokesperson Nahla Mahmoud with death, calling her a ‘Kafira’ and ‘Murtada’ who has offended Islam and brought “fitnah”. The threats have been reported to the police who have closed the case and advised that nothing could be done.

…

Nahla writes: “I am most concerned with the harassment by Mr. Salah Al Bandar. Not only is he endangering my health and sense of safety and security in the UK, but he is also organising against me back in Sudan in ways that are potentially very dangerous for both myself and my family. As a consequence, my younger brother has been physically attacked in Sudan, my mother has been seriously threatened and I continue to get threats and have had to endure a number of cyber stalking episodes by Mr Al Bandar or his associates.”

I don’t just support Nahla Mahmoud, I oppose the kind of vicious demagoguery perpetrated by Al Bandar, which has no place in any civilized nation.

Bradley Manning Not Guilty Of ‘Aiding The Enemy’

Bradley Manning is facing a whole laundry list of charges, but on the main one of aiding the enemy, Manning has been found not guilty. He’s still going to do a lot of jail time, rather than receiving a medal, though, and that’s another dark blot on American history.

Zinnia Jones has more on Manning the person.

Juan Cole reminds us that Manning was tortured, and compares him to Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian who immolated himself in protest.

Manning, like Bouazizi, is young. He also faced, with all his youth and inexperience and impatience, a political situation that was the result of criminality. Dick Cheney and John Yoo and Karl Rove and George W. Bush were responsible for creating a public image of government lawlessness that encouraged whistle blowing. They went to war against Iraq on false pretenses and in contravention of international law. They themselves tried to leak the identity of Valerie Plame, a covert CIA operative, to the press. They set up Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and Bagram as black torture facilities. They lied repeatedly to the American people (there was no looting in Iraq, no guerrilla war in Iraq, no civil war in Iraq, no torture practiced by the US in Iraq, no more than 30,000 civilian dead in Iraq, no need for more armored vehicles for our troops in Iraq).

The political situation Manning faced was also unyielding. Long after the American public turned against Washington’s Forever Wars, they are still being pursued, and are killing thousands of innocent civilians for war goals that range from the highly unlikely to the utterly phantasmagoric. Manning’s leak was an act of desperation no different in intent from Bouazizi’s self-immolation. He intended to protest, by putting himself on the line. He wrote in chat room, “god knows what happens now — hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms — if not & we’re doomed.” He did not intend to get caught, but he must have known the risks. His was a cyberspace form of self-immolation, a career-ending, decisively life-changing act that, however foolhardy or possibly illegal, was certainly courageous.

Manning is going to jail. Cheney, Yoo, Rove, and Bush walk free.